Oil giant ADNOC brings in OpenAI's AI agents as Abu Dhabi signs four agreements at once

State oil company ADNOC on Monday announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI and the Emirati AI company G42 at the ADIPEC energy exhibition in Abu Dhabi. According to Arabian Business, ADNOC is the first energy company to deploy OpenAI Frontier, a platform for cooperating AI agents, across all of its operations. The agents are to analyse decisions along the entire chain: reservoirs, drilling, refining, logistics, sales and trading. The platform runs on G42's AI infrastructure in the Emirates, and human experts will continue to make the major decisions.

In practice, ADNOC wants to speed up oilfield planning by combining data from thousands of wells with its own ENERGYai system. According to the company, that planning could shrink from months to hours. A second application estimates the value of each barrel of oil before it is even extracted, based on demand, supply, prices and margins. ADNOC already uses ChatGPT Enterprise with more than 40,000 employees.

The ADNOC deal was one of four agreements that Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed saw signed on Monday in the presence of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, The National reports. Investor Mubadala will use AI with Inception42, a G42 subsidiary, and OpenAI for investment analysis and risk assessment. The Abu Dhabi government also wants to make a set of regulations machine-readable so that AI can help officials with routine checks, and there will be a five-year partnership on AI in government, business and education. No amounts were disclosed.

According to Bloomberg, cited by Börsvärlden, the agreements come as OpenAI seeks capital from state-backed investors in the region. Investors from the Emirates, including the MGX fund, are expected to be the largest backers in the company's ongoing funding round.